WHATEVER

The connection is unstable, it cuts you mid sentence more than once, and after a couple more tries, we give up. I call you guys in peace tomorrow from home, i text.

It’s raining hard and i need to keep my eyes on the road, so i leave my phone as soon as i type these few words. Only later, finally indoor and dry, i check it again and see your answer:

Have a good night, we call tomorrow. Rest well – and do whatever is best for you.

These few words hit me on so many different levels. They communicate the deep love i know you and dad have for me and which i never doubt, one of the greatest gifts of this life. Yet, from them also transpires all your worry and mistrust. In these few two sentences our relationship is represented perfectly.

A confused woman, a delicate child, an annoying teenager.

For you, i am three in one, an utterly imperfect god.

Do whatever is best for you.

I sense your disappointment and your preoccupation, and it angers and embarrasses me. While perfectly understandable, i wish you did not feel it. Can you not simply let me be, let me try and fly free for a while, leap into the unknown, only offering me the unbreakable, infinitely precious safety net of your love?

The fresh tattoo throbbing on my skin under the layers of winter clothes aptly burns with the shame your judgement, your disapproval, cause in me.

“Such a childish whim, getting a large and expensive tattoo when you are about to quit your safe and stable job for – well, nothing, no certainty, no plan, nothing!”

You get into my head with an ease that annoys and angers me in equal parts. I always thought dad’s voice was the predominant one, the most pervasive and paralysing. The past few months, since i have taken this troubling decision, have shown me that your voice is not only in my head – it’s in my every cell. You are me. Probably, you will always be.

Yet i know this voice is not your true voice. And i know that the imperfect trinity you think i am is not me. And i think you know this too.

But here we are, unable to really understand each other.

How can i explain to you the inexplicable, the feeling of unbearable loss i felt today at the tattoo studio where i paid to get my body tortured and marked forever? The sense of wasted potential that overwhelmed me to the point i almost weeped? Every painting, every sketch, every sculpture, every picture that decorated it – the clumsier, uglier, funnier, the more painful.

I was such a creative, talented child! What happened? How has life drained me? And the unutterable question:

was it your fault?

––

The reflection of light in the old washing basins caught our attention, and we stopped by them, quietly, for a minute. I think i know what crossed your mind then: how absurdly recent is this past, when women gathered around these large tanks to wash linens and clothes, their hands reddened by the cold water and roughened by the scrubbing – and how far have we come! And i also remember what i was thinking: how happier must these slower times have been, how simpler and less cruel!

This captures perfectly our relationship, the differences at the core of our discussions and fights and misunderstandings.

Thirty years of life separate us, nothing, a speck of dust-time. Yet how far apart this speck sets us, and how unbridgeable it makes our distance!

It breaks my heart, and i know it breaks yours.

But i also have to remember how much we both have changed, and the progress our relationship has been making. Baby steps, i repeat to myself, and fall asleep feeling your presence next to me, rocking me to sleep with your soft voice that i wish would sing for me as if i were a little child again.